The Mississippi Delta
begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in
Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepheard’s, the London
Savoy of this section. If you stand near its fountain in the middle of the
lobby, where ducks waddle and turtles drowse, ultimately you will see everybody
who is anybody in the Delta and many who are on the make.

Memphis is the metropolis of the Delta. It is its financial,
social, and cultural capital. Many of its citizens grew wealthy by lending
money at exorbitant rates of interest to Delta planters. When a gentleman of
the old school needed a loan he did not quibble about the cost, especially if
there had been a disastrous stud-poker game the night before. Other Memphians
founded their dynasties in lumber. They leaped from cypress to Cezanne in one
generation. Some of them brought fortunes to Memphis from Arkansas. They had
lived on land which “wasn’t fitten fur a houn’dawg.” But oil spouted underneath
their feet. On the whole, however, Memphis draws its sustenance from its im­mense
surrounding territory, and the Delta is one of its richest tributary provinces.

Culturally, Memphis is to the Delta what Paris is to
Toulouse. One day I wandered into a bookshop there. I asked for a book by
William Faulkner. The clerk, a fragilely lovely woman of the old régime, flew
into a rage. “That man!” she said. “He ought to be run out of the country,
writing about the South the way he does.” I retreated rapidly to my second line
of defense. “Have you anything by Thomas Wolfe? Isn’t he one of your famous
Southern writers?” “Well, he might be, but we don’t approve of him, either.”
Finding that both my authors were on the Index, and that I had been mistaken
for an upstart Yankee, I browsed among the shelves for a while, quietly licking
my wounds. Then I asked delicately whether books were not at least a minor
passion of the people of Memphis. “No, people don’t read many books here. Do
you live in town?” I regretted profoundly that I did not. “Then,” she said, in
a sudden burst of confidence, “I’ll tell you the truth. We don’t have any real
culture in Memphis. We have culturine. You know, like oleo­margarine. Looks
like butter but isn’t.”

That may or may not be true. There are many cultures in the
world composed of many things ranging from sauces to sym­phonies. I do know
that Memphis has beaten biscuit, rambler roses, and luscious lawns. To Delta
citizens in search of light it glows with the beauty of the honey-colored pile
of the Erech­theum seen at sunrise from a high Athenian hill. Here they all
come in good time to see the occasional flesh-and-blood actors who appear upon
its stage, to hear the rare symphony orchestra that straggles down from the north
like a lone lost wild duck, and to dance to the music of some radio band
advertising the virtues of a genteel purgative.

Here, too, come the business men of the Delta to make loans,
sell cotton, buy merchandise, and attend conventions. For a day or two the
lobby of the Peabody isfilled with ice-cream men and their
ice-cream wives. They suddenly melt into noth­ingness and are succeeded by
ant-exterminators bent upon destroying the termite, which, like the politician,
is blind but destructive. Then the undertakers appear. They discuss em­balining
by day. By night they dance delicate dances macabre with their necrophilic
ladies under the scared and disapproving eyes of the Negro waiters. Finally
they vanish into the outer darkness from which they came, giving way to
hay-and-feed men who year long have cherished harlequins in their hearts now to
be released in this place of bright carnival. Month after month come the
conventions. The banners of business adorn the railings of the mezzanine, songs
and resounding speeches come like the roar of the distant sea to lesser
citizens as they sit at lunch or dinner in the hotel dining-rooms, and town
competes with town for the honor of entertaining the carbonated-beverages men
next year. During these periods the panoplied life of the sixteenth century
guilds is created anew. The lobby glows briefly with the glory of the vanished
Cloth Hall of Ypres.

The Delta, however, loves life as well as art and profits,
and in Memphis the stern business man shows the world his other soul-side. Here
he meets his inamorata, come up from his home town to sit for a little while
together under a mango tree and lose the noisy sentient world. Here he goes in
search of frail women, human, all too human, who live in houses with shades
perpetually drawn, or he stumbles perhaps with a sudden gasp of delight upon
some peripatetic beauty strolling sloe-eyed and lost in the soft darkness of
the hotel mezzanine. Sin, a hydra-headed monster at home, becomes in Memphis a
white dove cooing in the shade of tall cathedral columns.

Women of the Delta pass transiently through the lobby of the
Peabody as they go to buy clothes or to get a permanent wave. A trip of two
hundred miles is but a pilgrim’s tribute to loveliness. Or sometimes they track
culture to its lair in the recesses of a metropolitan woman’s club where the
nineteenth century in Europe is taken up intact at three o’clock and set down
in fragments among the tea things at four.

Here the young men and young women of the Delta stop between
trains en route to schools and colleges. Everybody in the area is
whole-heartedly for what is vaguely called “educa­tion,” but the reasons for it
are always a little dim. For a while they fill the lobby with their laughter,
and suddenly, like migra­tory birds, are gone, to come again at Christmas and
in June.

All in all, at one time or another, everybody passes this
way, and here one begins to glimpse the civilization of the Delta and to bruise
his perceptions on the jagged points of its paradoxes.

Catfish Row, far to the south in Vicksburg, is a typical
gather­ing-place of Negroes. Here are no marble fountains, no orchestras

playing at dinner, no movement of bell-boys in bright
uniforms. Tumble-down shacks lean crazily over the Mississippi River far below.
Inside them are dice games and “Georgia skin”; the music of guitars, the aroma
of love, and the soul-satisfying scent of catfish frying to luscious
golden-brown in sizzling skillets. In Vicksburg Negroes eat catfish as catfish
at fifteen cents a plate. In the cities white folks eat it as filet of sole at
a dollar a portion. Negroes are realists and purists. They are satisfied with
the catfish as God made it without benefit of the expensive euphem­isms of a
white maftre d’hôtel.

Racially the white of the Delta are largely Anglo-Saxon. Re­ligiously
they are Protestant. The Episcopalians are smallest in numbers and largest in
membership of old families. Baptists are myriad. They assail the ear of heaven
with stentorian voice on Sundays. There are a few Catholics. They walk alien
ways lighted by tall candles and perfumed with incense redolent of Rome, intent
upon their own purposes, seeking salvation with Latin incantations. But they
are lost in the Protestant mass.

This is a church-going and whisky-drinking society. That
which is due to the church and to the bootlegger is offered up with such smooth
harmony that the life of the body and the life of the spirit go happily In
mystic marriage. Mississippi is legally dry, but the liquors of Louisiana are
brought across the river, and potent brews are distilled in the swamps. The
Delta has indeed the distinction of having created its own yin de pays, the corn whisky of one of its towns being famous for
hundreds of miles around.

The churches of the Delta are not content merely to assure
the salvation of their own members. The woes of. the world impinge upon them
and they mourn for the lost of Africa and Of China. Bazaars, dinners, and
“social? are held continually for the purpose of raising money for foreign
missions. Occa­sionally the bread cast upon the waters returns tenfold when a
missionary comes from overseas to report how the sweating heathen of Africa
have been taught, in the midst of a thousand false gods worshiped in a thousand
false ways, to render homage to the one true God in the one true way which is
the sole possession of his sect. Then there ensues a great feasting and
communion of souls mystically joined in the common task of bringing light into
the darkness of hearts which Cod for some strange reason failed to illuminate
with the brilliance of God­head. Amid music and song eyes are lifted on high in
gratitude. If they are blurred by a myopia which reveals the plight of
Bechuanaland blacks ten thousand miles away, and obscures the fate of poor
whites near by as they descend from degradation to degradation, who shall
question the wisdom of God’s plan and the works of his appointed ministers on
earth?

The civilization of the Delta is on the surface simple and
almost naïve. Actually it is filled with complexities, with clash­ing
contradictions and irreconcilable disharmonies. In its toler­ance it shelters
without hindrance every sect and creed within its borders. In its fanaticism it
has descended to the hatreds and bigotries of the Ku Klux Klan. Devoting large
sums to secondary education, it scarcely considers that literacy has profounder
meanings than the ability to read and write. College-going, its students
largely miss the point. They rarely return with a passion for truth, with an
intellectual curiosity aroused and a desire to pursue beauty and wisdom for
their own sakes.

Culture is distrusted. One who bears it or seeks it is
regarded as being unfitted for the stern struggle of life. If a man should
collect Byzantine textiles or Persian ceramics, his business ability would be
discounted and serious doubts thrown upon his sexual virility. It is suspect to
read good poetry and catastrophic to one’s reputation as a normally functioning
male to write it. Red-blooded men simply do not do that kind of thing. Fine
distinc­tions are, however, drawn and exceptions made. A man may with impunity
collect firearms, stamps, daggers, and stuffed birds. These are protoplasmic.
He may like bird dogs, but not Persian cats. Coffee, but not tea. Whisky, but
not wine. The Delta, in the midst of a Western civilization, cherishes taboos
as rigid and as all-inclusive as may be found in a Melanesian village.

The field of intellectual culture is a matriarchy ordered
and pre-empted by women. This is done with the cheerful consent of the men, who
feel that the manifestations of culture are things with which their wives may
harmlessly amuse themselves in the long afternoons. And they do.

It is no feat at all for a study club to toss off the
Periclean age of Greece in an hour and send its members away in plenty of time
to get the dinner going before their husbands come home. The jump from
Aristotle to trailing arbutus is easily made be­cause there is a magnificent
indifference to relevancy and con­tinuity. Subject matter is not of much
importance provided that it be non-controversial and delicately ladylike.
Shelley is a favorite. Little essays on religious leaders are always welcome.
Marie Antoinette, gentle, fragile, beautiful, and queenly, dies a merciful
death just before the ice-cream and cake are served. Napoleon, torn without
benefit of anaesthetic from the encyclo­paedia, collides with the tea and comes
out second best. The veil is torn from the mysteries of ancient Egypt by a
member just re­turned from a cruise, while the audience sinks into a mood
sweetly-sad as another plays Humoresque on
the violin. Some­times poets read original poems. Virgin brides entangled in
dis­appointment and false rhyme die in the white moonlight. Gal­lant youths
stammer of undying love in metaphors hopelessly mixed. Mockingbirds sing among
the poison ivy. For poetry, too, is of the company of the seven arts and every
member must have her fling.

The pursuit of knowledge is not, however, the sole diversion
of the Delta. The people are kind, gregarious, and genuinely hospitable.
Isolated from theaters and night clubs, few in num­ber in the towns and fewer
in the country, they visit and are visited by innumerable friends and relatives
throughout the year. The length of visits is usually vague in the minds of both
host and guest. Hospitality is not chilled by the blight of a parsimonious
invitation for a weekend, and if the visit of days lengthens into months the
host is usually pleased. A gracious elderly woman of the old régime told me,
without sense of the unusual, that “Mary Bruce came to stay for six weeks and
re­mained eight years.” So hospitable indeed are these people that if you are
at all presentable and have any charm—fortunately for civilization charm
remains here the passport to all homes and all hearts — you will be passed on from family to family in the Delta for as
long as you like. When you leave one town in the Delta to go to another, your
host insists upon tele­phoning his Aunt Clara to meet you. You stay then at her
house. She in turn passes you on to her Uncle Fred who lives on Swan Lake
plantation, and thus you may go on for years moving from one house to another,
paying for your keep in the bright coin of chatter and conversation.

Summerlong, when the crops are growing, the youngsters are
at home from school, and there is little business to be done, the roads are
alive with automobiles, and the nights are merry with the music of dance
orchestras. Everybody within a radius of fifty or a hundred miles knows when a
dance is to be held, and neither heat, perspiration, nor rutted roads keep them
away. Often these gatherings are held in the courthouse. Then one may see girls
in bouffant frocks of organdie powdering their noses in the jury-box or nursing
their weary feet on the judge’s rostrum, while a sweat-bedrenched Negro
orchestra hurls jagged bits of jazz into the heavy heated air.

At rare intervals a large steamboat built solely for dancing
comes up the river from New Orleans. The old-fashioned “floating palace” or
showboat has vanished. The drama has given way to the dance. The huge boat
glows with light, and its orchestra, through amplifiers, hurls its music out
upon the river, against the banks of the levee, high up to the unblinking
swarming stars of surmner. Its searchlights play upon the stream­ing crowds as
they ascend the hill of the levee and march over the gangplank to fairyland
within. On the crown of the levee stand or sit hundreds of Negroes, their ears
wooed by the music, their eyes enchanted by the myriad lights, their souls
weary in the presence of this other-world beauty suddenly come within their
view but beyond their grasp. Crowds stream down to the river’s edge, and when
all those who are going have finally been assembled after repeated hootings of
the whistle to warn the lagging, the boat shoves off downstream.

The dance floor is thick-clotted with people moving to the
music of a Negro orchestra whose members are resplendent in uniforms which are
a doorman’s dream of heaven. There are loud laughter, shouts of recognition,
tilting of bottles, and hurried introductions. The dancing is energetic. In it
is a bit of Saint Vitus and the movements of standing upon a hot stove. Dark
splotches soon appear upon the white linen suits of the men. On the faces of
the women the make-up runs in tiny rivu­lets. The rich voice of a Negro
baritone floats above the heads of the dancers. He recalls the sadly voluptuous
fortunes of that

“St. Louis woman with the diamond
ring,

St. Louis woman with that man tied
to her apron string.”

The close-packed
mass of humanity pillows itself upon the soft bosom of a waltz. It becomes
excited by the hot staring eyes of jazz. It oscillates a bit wonderingly to the
alien rhythm of the rumba. The night slips by.

Outside on the top deck there is darkness. Restless breezes
of the river come coolly blowing. There is no sound save the far-away murmur of
the music, the muted voices of lovers, and the drip, drip, drip of water on the
paddlewheel. The boat is suspended between river and sky. Its fingers of light
search the nether banks both sides. Green willows of Arkansas suddenly appear
out of the black night. Shantyboats of fishermen pop up shining white out of
the dark waters. The lanterns of the aroused occupants glow like insect’s eyes
for a moment and vanish. It is nearing midnight and the boat slowly turns to
begin its homeward voyage.

When the passengers disembark the moon has risen. The land
lies drowned beneath a flood of silver. Cows lie sleeping on the levee, resting
heavily upon their folded feet. Mules move about, cropping grass, looking like
questing creatures out of a dream. Negroes gaze at the incredible blaze of the
steamboat’s lights, and watch the white folks as they get into their automo­biles
and go away. Over the levee’s rim the town lies sleeping and the roads that
lead to plantation homes far away shine in the white moonlight. The air is
alive for a little while with the coughing of motors and the shouts of
good-bye. Then there is stillness. The lights of the boat go out. Only the
beams of its searchlight are alive now as they search the shores. Its
paddle-wheel makes silver circles as it slowly turns and goes down­stream to
bring beauty and enchantment to another river town. Far off there is the baying
of a dog. A mockingbird essays a fugitive note or two from the top of a tree.
Silence then. The Delta sleeps the hot night through.

If the Delta is radical about its jazz, it is conservative
about its social and legalistic points of view. In rapidly changing America it
remains a society almost feudal. It fears change. It does not welcome political
innovations. Its whole system of codes and criteria of conduct are set up to
preserve the status quo based upon
the plantation tradition, the one-party political order, and white domination
of a numerically black majority.

The voters are almost entirely Democrats. The few Republi­cans
straying lost and alone seem prehistoric creatures miracu­lously surviving into
modern life. They are so rare indeed as seldom to be seen in the flesh, and
rich rewards are open to the showman who captures a few of these strange
animals and exhibits them here in a cage for a fee. This is the land of the Democratic party, come hell and high water.

The non-Anglo-Saxon portion of the population is composed of
Sicilians, Chinese, Syrians, Greeks, and Jews. The first genera­tion of
Sicilian men in the Delta wore gold earrings and cele­brated the feast of Saint
Joseph with colored candles and tiny cakes intricately wrought. The second
generation wear dandruff like an aura on their tight-fitting suits and cheer
the home team from the bleachers. The Chinese, celebrated for their thrift and
industry, have lost the one and retained the other. They are victims to the
American passion for the automobile. They have Negro mistresses who support
black lovers out of their largesse. The Syrians traffic in little grocery
stores not for ivory, apes, and peacocks, but for tinned milk and snuff. They
lend neither their culture nor their color to the Delta. The Greeks, far from
the wine-dark sea, conduct fruit stands and concoct greasy messes in smelly
restaurants faintly reminiscent of the crowded anterooms of free venereal
clinics. The Jews, by legend both intellectual and shrewd, seem in this soft
climate to have lost both these qualities. They are distinguished neither by
learning nor by riches. The national frenzy for uniformity is at work here as
elsewhere in the United States.

The Negroes, who constitute a vast numerical majority of the
population are of every kind and intermixture. The white man’s blindness to
differentiations among them was long ago summed up in one of his songs: “All
coons look alike to me.” They exhibit, as a matter of fact, an astounding
diversity. They are, to begin with, descendants of hundreds of tribes torn from
every part of Africa. Many of them were markedly different from others in
color, physique, language, culture, and occupation. Some lived by hunting,
others by agriculture, by keeping herds, by warring on their neighbors. They
dwelt on coastal plains, in the hot interior, in the foothills of mountains, in
every kind of climate and against every kind of background. They had many
cultures. Some were rude barbarians. Others created those sculptures of wood
and bronze which have enormously influenced the world of modern art.

A curious case based upon this diversity of Negro peoples
came to light some years ago in a criminal trial in the Delta. A Negro woman
stabbed a Negro man. Her reason was that he had called her a “Nigger.” “I’m no
nigger,” she said. “My grand­ma told me not to let nobody call me no nigger.
I’m a Molly Glasser and an ink-spitter.” Upon examination it developed that she
was descended from the tribe of Malagasi. They were a strong and superior
people who themselves had owned slaves. They were betel-chewers and
expectorated black. Unfortunately, the law does not recognize distinctions of
this kind. The descend­ant of the Malagasi went to jail.

Some of the slaves brought to America had been kings,
chiefs, and warriors. They were men of spirit, proud and dignified. Others had
been slaves in Africa. They were craven and obse­quious. To the white trader
they were all “black ivory,” ethno­logically indistinguishable. And the white
planter, if they were strong and obedient, had no deeper curiosity about them.

After three hundred years in America the blood of these
diverse peoples has been improved or debauched —
it depends upon one’s point of view — with
the blood of nearly all the whites who inhabit this continent, and with many of
the Indians and Asiatics. Negro women have borne children to men who were
members of the first families of the land and to the lowest white degenerates.
They have been mothers to impossible hy­brids and nurtured inconceivable
mixtures of blood. These hybrids have in turn bred and interbred with other
full-blooded and hybrid Negroes, so that the strains are hopelessly confused
and mixed.

In the Delta one finds Negroes with the clearly defined fea­tures
of the best Anglo-Saxons. There is a song about it:

I had a baby and its eyes are blue,

It can’t be mine, Cap’n; it must be
you.

Others have the slant eyes of the Chinese, or the nose of
the Jew. The bed of the Negro woman has been a leveling-ground of democracy. A
doctrine upon which all could agree. Delta Negroes are of every shade. There
are at least three gradations of brown dark brown, deep brown, and reddish
brown. They are black, pale black, and profoundly deep black. Some have the
golden-yellow of the banana. Others are smoothly chocolate. A man passes you,
the color of ripe olive. Another is copper. In a church choir a man of bronze
stands next to a girl the color of cream. The eye searching for color is
enchanted observing the delicate variations of shade in a Negro crowd. Because,
however, of the isolation of the Delta and the overwhelming majority of the
Negro population, thousands of Delta blacks are still full-blooded.

All of these people, white, black, and yellow, live in the
ten counties which make up the Mississippi Delta. It stretches from a point
just south of Memphis to a point just north of Vicksburg. It is one hundred and
fifty miles long and fifty miles wide. The Mississippi washes its entire
western side, and the Yazoo much of its eastern.

Here live 293,000 Negroes and 98,000 whites.

The Negro completely dominates the Delta in numbers. This is
the one fact indispensable to an understanding of this society. Out of it flow
the contradictions, complexities, and paradoxes which characterize its social
and economic systems. It is the cause of distortions and stresses in the beings
of the whites. It brings about inevitable repercussions in the blacks. It is
largely the reason for the restrictions and disabilities placed upon Negroes.
It is the source of difficulties which perplex the gov­erning whites. The men
who control the Delta never forget for a moment that the Negro is the majority.
It colors their actions and stands in the forefront of their thoughts.

Mississippi is the only state in the union having a
preponder­ance of Negroes in its population. At the census of 1930 there were
slightly more than one million Negroes among the two million people of the
state. Negroes made up 50.2 per cent of the whole. But in the Delta more than
70 per cent of the popula­tion is black.

Unless you have lived here, the density of Negroes in the
population seems incredible. A comparison of this section with other parts of
the country brings out the disparity in high relief. Figures are taken from the
census of 1930 and are in round numbers.

In New England, for instance, there are 8,000,000 people.
Only 90,000 are Negroes. The Delta has less than 400,000 people. And nearly
300,000 are Negroes.

The state of Maine has 795,000 whites and 1000 Negroes. The
Delta county of Issaqueena has 1000 whites and 4600 Negroes.

Many Delta plantations have more Negroes than are to be
found in the entire state of Vermont with its 565 blacks.

Massachusetts has over 4,000,000 whites and 52,000 Negroes.
That is precisely the number to be found in the one Delta county of Bolivar.

The Middle Atlantic States have a total population of 25,-000,000.
They have 265 times as many whites as are in the Delta. But only 3 times as
many Negroes.

There are more Negroes in Sharkey County than in all of
Minnesota. But Minnesota has 700 times more whites than this county.

North Dakota’s whole Negro population of 377 would not make
an impressive “turn-out” for the funeral of a Delta Negro preacher. South
Dakota’s 646 Negroes are just about the number to be found working in many
Delta lumber-mills.

The combined states of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado,
New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada have fewer Negroes than live in Coahoma
County in the Delta.

More than 7,000,000 people live in the Pacific States. But
the two counties combined of Bolivar and Leflore in the Delta have as many
Negroes.

If the population of the Delta is considered with reference
only to its own components, the dominance of the Negro remains strikingly
apparent.

In Coahoma County there are 3000 Negroes for every 1000
whites. In Humphreys County there are 5000 Negroes for every 1000 whites. And
in Tunica County there are 7000 Negroes for every 1000 whites. These ratios
apply to every county in the Delta. At his fewest, as in Humphreys County, the
Negro con­stitutes 68 per cent of the population. At his most numerous, as in
Tunica County, he makes up 85 per cent of the whole.

It is obvious that there can be no Negro problem where there
are no Negroes. Nor where there are few Negroes, as in Ver­mont. Nor where
there are many Negroes lost in an overwhelm­ingly white population, as in New
York. But there is a Negro problem where a few whites live among vastly
dominant masses of Negroes. That is the situation in the Delta.

The Negro’s identification with the life of the Delta is
funda­mental and complete. He came here as a slave with the earliest settlers.
He has remained to live and multiply as a freedman. This land is first and last
his handiwork. It was he who brought order out of a primeval wilderness,
felling the trees, digging the ditches, and draining the swamps. He erected the
homes which shelter him and the white man. He built the schools, the courts,
the jails, the factories and warehouses. He was a roustabout on the river boats
which connected the Delta with the outside world, and toiled up the steep banks
of the landings bearing in­credible loads on shining black shoulders singing:

“O Lawd, O Lawdie.

All right, boys.

De man done called us

An’ let us go.

“O Lawdie, de Cap’n Done called us

But us didn’t send for you.

We sent for a bar’l er pork An’
looked up de road

An’ seen you come pokin’.

“O
Lawdie, O Lawd,

“O Lawdie, let us go.”

The Negro was builder, too, of the railroads which were for­ever
to extinguish the glory of steamboating on the Mississippi and the gorgeous
dynasty of the river captains. Later he built the concrete roads which in turn
were to cripple the railroads. rhe vast ramparts of the levees upon whose
existence the life of the Delta depends sprang from the sweat and brawn of the
Negro. Wherever one looks in this land, whatever one sees that is the work of
man, was erected by the toiling, straining bodies of blacks.

The white men with whom the Negro came to the Delta as slave
were unique among pioneers. Here were no lean Yankees marching with rifie,
family, and meager possessions across the illimitable plains. No refugees from
the Germany of forty-eight. No Irish of the famine years, empty-handed and
eager, search­ing for a new home in a new world. These men were the em­bodiment
of a seeming contradiction — pioneers
with means. They were sons of wealthy and moderately wealthy planters of
Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee. They had a definite gentle
culture and the deep-rooted sense of responsi­bility common to their kind. Used
to wealth and possessing it, they were men of property moving with their
families, their slaves and manifold possessions, like princely patriarchs of
the Old Testament.

The land to which they came was land of the loins of the
river. It had sprung from the body of the Mississippi in a gestation eons long.
Untold centuries ago it began to deposit here the rich detritus of mountains
and plains borne on its bosom as it flowed from the north to the south to sea.
Accretion by slow accretion, without foundation of rock or shale, it laid down
this land. Here are no hills, no rocks, no thin earth barely hiding the stones
beneath, but pure soil endlessly deep, dark and sweet, dripping fatness.

And when, after tens of thousands of years, the land had
been built, the forests came. There were oaks and cypresses, sweet gum and
leafy cottonwood, persimmon and pecan, walnut, and maple. Cane grew to great
heights to make an impenetrable jungle. Vines and creepers laced and interlaced
in intricate tangle. Here was an animal’s paradise of bear, deer, opossum,
raccoon, rabbit, squirrel, panther, and mink. Birds native and migratory filled
the silent woods with the loud music of the singing. In the autumn, dawn rose
on the wings of myriads of wild ducks. Darkness fell with their
swift-descending flight to the bosoms of lakes and ponds. Snakes swarmed on the
land and in the water; mosquitoes ascended from the steaming swamps in clouds;
bullfrogs disturbed the austerity of the night with their obscene croakings;
turtles elongated their reptilian heads on logs rotting in green-scummed
creeks.

Century after century the land lay as in a dream. The rich
earth became ever richer with the decay of leaf mold and vegeation; the
passionate embrace of deep-rooted trees and close-clinging vines made it secure
against washing and erosion in torrential rains. The Spaniard came and Hernando
de Soto was buried in the Delta’s river, but the land did not stir in its
sleep. More than a century later, when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, it
was still primeval wilderness. It sent no soldiers to the War of 1812 because
there were no men to send. It was not until 1825, scarcely more than thirty
years before the Civil War, that the first settlers came. The civilization of
the Delta is little more than one hundred years old.

At this time many planters in the more northerly states of
the South began to find that their farming operations were becoming
unprofitable. Their lands under an unwise system of cultivation were losing
their fertility. Some of them suspected that slavery was eating Into their
profits. ‘these doubts nowever, to be resolved for forty years and were then to
be expressed not in rows of black figures on white paper, but in rows of white
grave-markers on the dark earth.

Rumors of the fertility of the soil of the Delta, then
called "the swamps,” began to drift back to Kentucky, Tennessee, Vir­ginia,
and South Carolina. Planters made inquiries about this yirgin land inhabited by
only a few Indians, fugitives from justice, and wild animals. Then they
purchased huge tracts and came with armies of slaves to clear the ground and
open planta­tions along the rivers and on the creeks. Roads, too, after a
fashion, were constructed. If they were mule-belly deep in mud in the winter
and storm-swept with dust in the summer, it did not greatly matter, for there
were the rivers, the Mississippi, the Yazoo, and the Sunflower, to serve as
arteries of transportation. And here on the banks of the rivers, in the bends
of the streams, on ridges or high ground safe from the floods, the pioneer
planters of the Delta built their homes.

This was a régime of the wealthy well-born planter; an econ­omy
of the huge plantation worked by large numbers of slaves. Lu it there was no
room and no welcome for the small non-slave-holding farmer who with his
family’s labor might till a few acres. This was a society of gentlemen,
overseers, and slaves. If now the gentlemen have almost vanished, if the sons
and grandsons of overseers rule where they once reigned, and the slaves lib­erated
into a dubious freedom, it still remains true that neither then nor now has the
Delta ever welcomed the so-called “poor white.” He took to the sterile hills of
Mississippi. There he raised large crops of children and meager crops of
cotton. He Worshiped a fierce God, hated aristocrats and Negroes, dwelt in
poverty and darkness, and awaited the day when he might descend upon these fat
lands. Now two terms out of three his Governor rules the state, his Senator
sits in the seats of the mighty, and he himself is coming down from his hills.

The tradition and fact of the Delta’s dependence upon Negro
labor began in the earliest days of the settling of the country. The men worked
in the fields and performed the manifold tasks that make up the daily round of
the plantation. The women cooked, washed, sewed, baked, and nursed in the
planter’s home. Younger boys served in the stables, waited at table, and were
companions in hunting and fishing to their master’s young sons. When the Civil
War came they rode off with them as body servants. Hundreds of others, suddenly
liberated from slavery and without hope of tangible reward, remained behind to
help and protect the planter’s defenseless womenfolk and children. The bonds of
slavery were sundered. The stronger ties of affec­tion held these alien peoples
together.

In the beginning the labor of every man and every tool was
needed for clearing the land, and while this task was being done time ran swiftly toward the
conflagration of the Civil War. It is for this reason, perhaps, that one does
not find in the Delta, ruined or intact, homes that remotely resemble in beauty
or magnificence the mansions that stood along the James and the Potomac or high
above the Mississippi at Natchez. Men con­tented themselves in the present with
comfortable, if modest, homes. They dreamed dreams which were never to be
realized of the day when they might erect replicas of the great houses they had
known and recreate the gracious culture they had abandoned.

The pioneers of the Delta, faced with a host of difficulties
and intent upon founding a civilization in a wilderness, did not know that this
land sheltered one of the most stubborn and dangerous diseases known to man. It
lurked in the swamps and lowlands of their new home. Its symptoms were still
identical with those described by Hippocrates more than two thousand years ago.
Its effects were as deadly here as they had been in Greece and Rome and India
where it had decimated armies and depopulated cities. That disease was malaria.

In the spring and summer and often until late in the autumn
nearly every man, woman, and child in the community was ill with malaria. They
burned with fever. They froze with chills. Their teeth chattered and their
temples flamed. In the intervals between the attacks which came every third or
fourth day they were listless and exhausted; too dull to think and too tired to
work. Traveler after traveler noted the physical debility of the people. The
more charitable ascribed it to unknown causes. The less charitable said that
they were lazy. But the disease went on and its cause was unknown. Each year
the bodies of the victims were drained of vitality and their minds of vigor.
Each year many died and found premature graves where they had hoped to find
happy homes.

There is no way to estimate accurately the social and
economic damage caused by malaria in the Delta. Its destruction in terms of
human pain and suffering is immeasurable, but it was un­doubtedly a factor of
grave importance in impeding the progress of this section. Men are not active
in the white shadows of anaemia. They do not create in exhaustion. They cannot
func­tion in fever. Life, to be fruitful, must be more than a rhythm swinging
from chill to chill.

Malaria came year after year at almost mathematically
regular intervals. The community knew when it would come, how long it would
stay, and what it would do. They saw it so often that they became accustomed to
it despite its pain and suffering. But when the deadly yellow fever came among
them they were stricken with terror. It did not come at regular intervals. Its
victims did not linger. They quickly died horrible deaths, or in rare cases
recovered. The cause of the disease and its treatment were equally unknown. The
people were helpless before this deadly scourge.

When the stricken began to vomit black and cough up their
life’s blood in thick clots, when their chests turned yellow and their
enfeebled bodies were storm-swept with dreadful retchings, the living could do
nothing to assuage the agony of the dying save to pray at their bedsides and
await the coming of merciful death. Safety, they knew, lay in flight to the
north. Many would not go, others could not go, and still others would not leave
their friends and relatives behind. Through the long, hot, melan­choly summer
in 1878 hundreds sickened and died of yellow fever, while the living, worn with
pain and grief, nursed the sick and buried the dead. Volunteer nurses, one
after one, con­tracted the illness and died. Others stepped promptly forward to
take their places. There seemed to be no way to arrest the busy, inexorable
hand of death, until, as the Greenville Times
reported in November of that year:

A big white frost last Monday
morning was a glorious sight for our people to see. To those within the
infected districts it was a token of rescue and rest; to those who were shut
off from their homes it was an assurance that their exile would soon be over,
and the sad homecoming was near at hand. With what agony of heart the white
robes of the blessed frost was watched and prayed for, none can know save those
who passed the fearful hours within the death-haunted districts, and friends
and rela­tives who watched and waited for the dark clouds to pass away.

The white frost of the autumn of 1878 marked the passing of
yellow fever for that year, but not its final end. It came again and again to
claim its victims in the summer and retreat before the frost in the autumn, and
when it did not come the threat of its coming chified the hearts of the people
every year. It in­ificted untold suffering and grief, kept prospective settlers
and investors away from the Delta, and wrought enormous damage to the entire
economic and social structure.

The Delta was founded and wrought in pain. By legend it is a
land of dolce far niente where the
sun shines, Negroes work, white men loaf on the verandas of white-porticoed man­sions,
and money mysteriously rolls in. As a matter of fact the pioneers who founded
this land fought against enemies as grim as those confronted by the men who
opened the west. The Delta has struggled for its existence against a dark
company. It has wrestled with malaria, yellow fever, the Civil War, Reconstruc­tion,
and the floods of the river. A handful of white men without enormous wealth or
political power, without gold or oil under their feet to bring them sudden
affluence, and against great odds, converted wilderness and tangled swamps into
a fat land. It is a measure of their effort that today, one hundred years after
the first settlers came, one of the most powerful enemies of the Delta is yet
unconquered, although the resources of the federal govermnent have now been
thrown into the scales against it. That is the Mississippi River.

The landscape of the Delta subject to the attacks of the
river is both beautiful and ugly. In
the spring and summer the fields are touched with the never failing beauty of
green growing things. Under the wide sky and immense horizon of this flat land
cotton marches in endless ranks of green save where it is joined by tall troops
of corn to which peavines cling, piling rich­ness upon richness and color upon
color. The humble okra at capricious intervals thrusts its fuzzy fruit into the
warm air. Watermelons lie like fat helpless drunkards, their dark bellies
turned upward to the sun. Pumpkins lie pale yellow upon the earth attached to
the slender umbilical cords of their vines. Sorghum stands in thick tropical
jungles. Great stretches of alfalfa carpet the earth lushly with deep green.
Soy beans pile their vines thick-clustered upon the warm land. Clover matches
the blue of its flowers with the blue of the azure sky. From hour to hour as
the sun burns with a greater or a lesser whiteness the landscape changes color.
The tin roofs of Negro cabins become burnished silver. The gray coat of a mule
far away in the fields becomes suddenly black. A passing cloud shades a field
to dark­ness so that it seems in the shimmering light surrounding it a bit of
dark driftwood afloat on a tossing sea of bright green. From sunrise to sunset
in the spring and summer the white light of the Delta creates miracles of
shadow and shade under the vast arch of the heavens.

As the brief spring glides imperceptibly into the hot days
of summer, the crops grow with furious rapidity, forced upward by the rich
earth, the warm rains, and the long hours of sunlight. Weeds grow with equal
rapidity, and as they come up the fields become alive with the chatter and
laughter of Negroes wielding hoes. The contest between man and nature for the
rich prize of the annual crops is never ending. In this warm climate, this
teeming soil, the earth throbs to give birth to myriad forms of plant life,
little caring whether they are friend or foe to ex­crescent man clinging to its
surface by the sweat of his brow.

In June the fields are starred with the beauty of millions
of cotton blossoms cream-white, soft-red, shell-pink. They vanish after a brief
day in the sun and give way to boils; hard tight little globes of green
containing the embryo of cotton. For three months they grow until suddenly in
August the cotton begins to burst through its confining walls. Bits of white
here and there fleck the sea of green. As the days pass the whiteness spreads
rapidly and more rapidly until it undulates in waves and rolls in billows,
drowning the land beneath its softness. Now the Ne­groes come to gather the
harvest. With long sacks of coarse canvas slung over their shoulders and
trailing the ground they pick the cotton. In time only the stalks remain to
become brown and withered with the frosts of autumn and rattle forlornly in the
winds of winter until they are plowed under in the spring. The fiat fields
stretch away mile after mile in a brown monotony un­broken by the surge or lift
of hills. Stumps of trees that were hidden by the thick-clustering leaves of
the cotton now splotch the fields. Beauty has flown from the Delta. It will
come again in the spring.

The roads become, in cotton-picking time, a thronged Appian
Way leading to the gins. Their rusty tin roofs shine now in the eyes of Negroes
with as great a glory as the dome of Saint Peter’s ever shone for home-haunted
Romans returning from exile. The fields are filled with cottonpickers, and as
fast as wagons and trucks can be filled they move to the gins in an almost
unending procession around the hands of the clock. Here the cotton vanishes, at
one end into the maw of a suction pipe, and emerges, stripped of its valuable
seed, at the other as the jute-wrapped bale of commerce. Long lines of wagons
and trucks wait their turn. Negroes lie sound asleep aloft on the high-piled
cotton under the shining sun or the starry sky. Ginned bales rumble down
inclines and are stacked by black brawny arms for shipment. The gins make a
fearful clatter in the quiet air of the countryside. For nine months of the
year they are silent. For three months they run. They seem now to crowd into
this too-brief season of activity the repressed forces of strength that must
lie dormant for most of the year. Plumes of steam wave in the autumn breezes.
Columns of black smoke stain the immaculate blue of the sky. Cotton seed
rattles loudly in tin pipes as it is blown under pressure into the seedhouses.

At night sudden blasts of flame assault the darkness as tne
nre doors of boilers are opened and shut. The gin is the annual journey’s end
for Negro share-croppers and white farmers.

This is the glad time of the year for Negroes. The long road
down which they have toiled for months now opens upon en­chanting vistas of
cash money and uninterrupted leisure. For weal or woe the crop has been made
and gathered. They will soon taste its first fruits in the form of “seed money”
— the crop­per’s share of the cotton
seed. Later there will be a final settle­ment of accounts for the year’s work.

The cropper sees but little cash during the cultivating and
growing season. Now that he has money in hand he goes on a spending spree. The
little country grocery stores which sum­merlong have had in stock only the most
utilitarian foods such as beans, fat meat, flour, lard, and coffee, now flaunt
on their shelves the unaccustomed luxuries of dried figs and raisins, apples
and oranges, lemons and grapes, and tinned California fruit. The dry-goods
stores, which have sold only work clothes and cheap cotton dresses, now display
wondrous suits for men dyed strange shades and richly adorned with multicolored
buttons. “Sunday” shoes, too, are now to be worn every day. Rayon socks and
rayon neckties are bright with shine, dripping color. Caps will be worn,
jauntily backwards, and there are shotgun shells for rabbit-hunting.

For the women there are dresses of fairy-like splendor woven
of the mist ingeniously mixed with satin, billowing with ruffles, bouffant with
lace, smart with pink and blue marabou, and all for less than five dollars.
Admirable dresses for walk­ing in the rain across muddy fields to visit
neighbors; su­perbly smart when worn with long white kid gloves to stand long
hours in hot dusty streets, waiting for the circus parade. Underwear, too — Negroes in their conservatism still wear it
of maize and purple rayon embroidered with magenta roses. Shiny panties are
only seventy-five cents, and that is merely the garnered sweat of ten hours’
work with a hoe in the hot sun magically crystallized into silver. Love
flourishes, beauty burns, and “us sho gwine have us a good time while us can.”
So with the buying of this and that, with the garnering of trinkets and bright
trash, the stores are crowded and the money is spent. The paean-obituary of a
year of hard work is then written by the financial agencies reporting that
“business in the Delta section of Mississippi is 5 per cent ahead of last
year.”

Delta white folks complain bitterly that the Negro with a
few dollars in his pocket will not work until the money is gone. Fortunately
for the white folks, these periods of spasmodic pros­perity do not last long.
The Negro and his money are soon parted. It is as difficult for him to hold
money as it would be to cling life-long to the face of a precipice by his
fingers. In his opinion thriftiness is utterly silly a characteristic of “mean
mens.” Tomorrow does not press, a crown of thorns upon his brow. And when the
last extremity has been reached there may be always found somehow a white man
to assume the burden of his meager keep.

‘Taint no use fer to work so hard,

I got a gal in de white folks’
yard;

She gives me biscuits and she gives
me lard.

Ef it wa’n’t fer de bulldog I’d go
in de yard,

Skeered he bite me, we shall be
free,

Skeered he bite me, we shall be
free,

‘Cause de good Lawd done set us
free.

This is true of the majority of Delta Negroes. There is a
tiny minority who are far-sighted, thrifty, parsimonious, and even miserly. By
virtue of their thrift they rise to economic inde­pendence and places of
importance in their communities. But they are lost in the thriftless mass.

Whether the Negro acquired his thriftlessness from the white
man or he acquired it from the Negro is a moot question. It is certain in the
Delta that both are guilty of it. When money is plentiful the planter and
townsman commit the same crimes against economy that the Negro does, differing
from him only in kind. In prosperous years they recklessly buy expensive auto­mobiles.
They travel up and down the country to visit friends or merely to move about.
They buy whatever they see and want at the moment with the fatal inability to
resist that marks the swiftly-upward open-mouthed night flight of a trout to
the lure of a fly. One bale of cotton buys a case of whisky. Two pay for the
“fixings” for the party at which its is drunk. Five bales buy a trip to
Chicago, and ten to New York. It is not hard to spend a cotton crop if one
works devotedly at the task. Soon the money vanishes. Usually it leaves no
traces of beauty or grace gar­nered; no utility gained; no memories of things
done and places seen to shine in arid after-years like unquenchable stars.

White folks complain, too, that the Negro won’t work unless
he is driven. This is true of many Negroes, but not of all. In the Delta there
are Negroes who are hard-working and indus­trious. They prosper without
supervision and point the way to their less energetic fellows. The attitude of
the average Negro toward work, however, is tempered by several considerations.
He feels, for one thing, that “he ain’t goin’ ter have nuthin’ nohow,” arising
either from a fear that he will be exploited or a knowl­edge of his own
inability to save or both. His wants are simple and easily satisfied. A little
labor suffices. He does not burn with the white man’s passion for acquisition.
He does not seek power. Money is a form of power, but the Delta Negro could not
wield it if he had it. He cannot, therefore, see why he should continue to work
when he is in possession of enough money to provide for his simple wants in the
immediate present.

He feels deeply that work is an unmitigated evil. It is a
form of dark penance which he must suffer if he would win through to the bright
pleasures of women, train-riding, gambling, and pic­nics. De Lawd put man on
earth to enjoy hisself, and when this life has done gone He’s gwine take us all
to a better lan' where don’t nobody work and Jesus sets on a golden throne, a
little white chile-angel on one side an’ a little black chile-angel on de
yother. Only white folks and fools work for the sake of working. They have no
time to enjoy the pleasures of this life nor to an­ticipate joyfully the
glories of the eternally happy life to come.

The Delta Negro has a high capacity for the artless
employment of leisure. Time does not hang heavy on his hands when he is free of
labor. The wellsprings of his being have not been poisoned at their source by
the white man’s virus of let us then be up and doing. On Sundays he does not
have the haunted, unhappy appearance common to many whites who shift from foot
to foot in drug stores through a day unbearably long, or, impelled by some
demon of discontent, drive aimlessly in wide circles through city streets or
over country roads. The Negro’s soul does not harbor the boredom which so often
drills with the insensate ruthlessness of a dentist’s instruments into the
white man’s soul, driving him to strange excesses of escape or to oblit­erating
narcotics of violence. He does not feel strongly the white man’s need for the
complicated paraphernalia of organized enter­tainment. Out of his sheer gusto
for living, his warm and earthly animalism, he creates his own amusements. He
makes his own songs and sings them, enjoys the company of his fellows, the
thrills and solace of religion, and the never-ending pleasures of conversation.

The Delta Negro likes to talk. His images are illumined by
vivid imagination. His speech drips color. It is filled with a sense of wonder
and biblical simplicity; often with an extraor­dinary quality of epigram and
precision. He is a maker and teller of stories. A creator and singer of songs.
A speculator on the origins of the universe. The birth of man and his destiny;
the sweetness of Jesus; the humanness of God; the mysteries of the Scriptures;
and the vagaries of the white folks — are stock themes of conversation among
Delta Negroes. They sit for hours on end in their cabins, at the gins, and in
country stores, talking in groups without cease. If one leaves, another,
entering, throws himself headlong into the conversation, although he has not
the slightest idea of the subject under discussion. The Delta Negroand this he probably learned from his
preacher — is a master of the non sequitur. He throws sentences recklessly
about as he throws dice, uncertain where they are going to land or what they
are going to reveal, but praying for the best.

On a Saturday morning two reverend elders of the Bright
Morning Star Baptist Church sit on smooth-worn benches in front of the Crescent
Café (for colored only), to remain until they go home hours later at nightfall.
They talk for a long time about Jesus. Their discussion ends with a review of
the day when He walked upon the waters — an
alluring theme in this land of floods — and
they turn then to Nebuchadnezzar, who strongly appeals to the imagination of
the rural Delta Negro.

“Does you ‘member dat day,” says one of the elders, “we’en
de zebers chased ole Nebuchadnezzar clean back in dat cave where de Lawd had
wrote on de wall in letters of fire, ‘Mene, Mene, Tikel, Tikel’?”

“Sho I ‘members dat,” replies the other elder. With bewilder­ing
irrelevancy and devastating assurance he reminds his friend that “hit’s jes’
lak I tole you. Dey wa’n’t no people at de be­ginnin’ of de worl’. Dey wa’n’t
nuthin’ but apes an’ monkeys an’ A-rabs. Right fum dat po’ start de Lawd He
made everything —hawgs, chickens, dawgs,
contrary wimmens, Shetlan’ ponies, white folks, niggers, and Chinermens.”

His companion gravely agrees that this is true according to
the Bible. In turn they wonder “w’en us gwine git a sho-nuf price for us
cotton.” They assert that “Gawd sho will strike you dead if you ‘fends His
commanderments,” and reiterate that their plantation manager “don’t know
nuthin’ ‘bout makin’ no cotton nohow.” They praise their preacher because
“dat’s a squallin’ nigger if dere ever wuz one in dis country.” From time to
time their conversation is interrupted to greet effusively, and as though they
had come from a far country, members of their com­munity whom they had just
left that, morning, would see again that night, with whom their whole lives had
been spent.

A white planter passing stops to ask the elders, “Have y’all
seen any of my niggers?” The language of slavery still carries over into
freedom, although its implications are softened now by paternalism. “Naw, suh,
Mister Ed, I ain’t see a one of ‘em,” replies an elder. His is the language of
caution and secretiveness in the presence of the white man. It is a survival,
too, of slavery and still flourishes in the Delta. “Well, I got room for two or
three of ‘em in my car and I thought I’d take ‘em on out home with me to save
‘em walking.” “I b’leeve I knows whar dem niggers at,” says the other elder,
who had been silent. “Dey’s at the Chinermen’s gittin’ theyseif somethin’
t’eat.” The need for caution has vanished. The information is freely given and
the planter goes off to the “Chinermen’s” in search of “his niggers.” Sometimes
Negroes illuminate with a single sentence the differing points of view which
motivate the white man of the North and the white man of the South in his
conduct and atti­tude toward Negroes. A man migrated from a small Delta town to
Boston. He was dissatisfied there and returned home. “Dey calls a nigger
‘mister’ up dere,” he said, “but it ain’t a white man will give you two bits to
put somethin’ in yo’ stomach when you’s hongry. And de niggers dey is jes’ as
bad. Dey won’t do nuthin’ to he’p nobody if dey down.”

In the Delta no white man will call a Negro mister. But
thousands of white men will cheerfully give almost any Negro two bits “to put
somethin’ in yo’ stomach.” He will indeed give small sums to the Negro more
quickly than he will to a fellow white man. But he will never under any
circumstances “mister” a Negro. This democratic title is reserved exclusively
for white men, as “Mrs.” and “Miss” are for white women only. Any Negro seeking
to be called by these titles by whites is deemed guilty of a serious breach of
the prevailing customs. And conversely, a white man using them in addressing
Negroes would fall under the grave suspicion of the community.

The code of the Delta white man is in many respects less
severe toward the Negro than whites. He is not held up to the same standards of
conduct. The people are enormously indul­gent of his faults and petty vices.
Negro servants, for instance, go on year after year committing the same crimes
of inattention, negligence, and extravagance with their employer’s goods and
money. Only the repetition of the grossest misconduct brings about their
discharge. They are severely reprimanded and for­given in the same breath.
These reprimands are governed usually by well-understood conventions on both
sides. They have the rigid stylization of a Japanese Noh play. Each acts his
part as though he were on a stage, knowing full well that the speeches of
castigation on the one side and the appearance of humble submission on the
other have no contact with reality. The white employer storms and shouts. He
makes dire threats of dismissal. He will not tolerate that kind of conduct
again. The

Negro looks sad and contrite. He fervently promises to menu
his ways. His head is bowed to the storm. He “yassuhs” every­thing his employer
says. Yet the white man knows even as he flings the lightnings of his wrath
that he will forgive his servant. And the servant knows that he will be
forgiven.

Not long ago I was the guest of an old family in Vicksburg.
We sat talking one afternoon and drinking sherry. My hostess, usually a
talkative and abstemious woman, drank steadily and silently. Finally she left
the room. “My wife rarely drinks any­thing,” her husband said, “but she has
been sitting here trying to get tight so that she could get up enough nerve to
fire the cook. She’s been trying to do it for eight years. When the time comes
she just can’t see it through.”

In a little while my hostess returned, sadly triumphant. She
bad told Louisa that she must leave. She would give her a month’s pay and
another month in which to find a job, but whenthe time came she reckoned she just couldn’t bear to see her go. Louisa
was so fond of the children and they of her. She was such a good cook. She did
take care of the house when they went to New York. What did it matter, after
all, if she took too much food out of the house, and occasionally went off,
without warning, for a week at a time with that good-for-nothing Negro from
across the river?

It had taken her eight years and half a bottle of sherry to
summon strength to fire the cook. Now that it had been done she spent the
afternoon miserably searching for reasons to keep her. When I left the issue
remained undecided. I feel, however, that Louisa will continue to cook for the
Hennings for a long time to come, that her large family will always flourish on
the Henning groceries, and that Louisa herself will leave the house­hold
without warning when love calls, to go off for a week at a time with that
good-for-nothing Negro from across the river.

The unwritten and unwritable codes which govern the con­duct
of white men toward the Negro in the Delta function in strange ways. There are
men here who would lynch a Negro without the slightest hesitation or
compunction. And equally without the slightest hesitation they would risk their
lives to save Negroes as they did in the great flood of 1927. There was a
famous physician in the Delta. He was a hand­some figure of a man, gentle,
kind, and soft-spoken. He might always be depended upon for aid at the lynching
of a Negro guilty of a sexual attack upon a white woman or a brutal homi­cide
upon a white man. Yet the Negroes knew him and loved him as one to whom they
might always unfailingly turn in time of illness.

During his life he spent hundreds of nights in forlorn Negro
cabins, waiting often until the dawn for the arrival of a child. His car stood
frequently in muddy streets outside the homes of Negroes. His office was daily
crowded with blacks to whom he gave aid and comfort. If they could pay, they
paid. If they could not pay they received the same treatment. And if they had
no money for medicine, he bought it for them. Illness alone was the passport to
his skill, and it mattered not whether those who carried it were poor and
black. Hundreds of Negroes in the Delta mourned his passing and venerate his
memory as their true friend.

There are white men in the Delta who exploit Negroes ruth­lessly.
There are others who treat them with every consideration of fairness and
justice. There are whites who cherish a venom­ous hatred of Negroes. There are
Negroes who bitterly hate whites. And there are thousands of whites and Negroes
between whom there exist long-sustained relations of good will, confi­dence,
and affection.

If the Negro in the Delta is isolated by ignorance and
distance from the intellectual currents of the outside world, the white man is
isolated by lack of curiosity. Year after year the Delta functions in almost
complete detachment in the land of the radio. All kinds of “isms” come and go
beyond its borders, but it hears little of them or, hearing, little heeds. The
roaring sounds of revolution in a changing world dwindle in this far distance
to tiny whispers. Change shatters itself upon the breast of thissociety as Pacific breakers upon a South Sea reef.

The Delta does not go far afield in its reading. It has an
in­stinctive Anglo-Saxon dislike for ideas. It reads the local news­papers
which report what everybody already knows, and the newspapers of Memphis which
have a distinctly sectional tinge. Among books it prefers non-controversial
best sellers. For critiques of the whole America it goes to the syndicated col­umnists.
Disturbing ideas crawl like flies around the screen of the Delta. They rarely
penetrate. It is only when the price of cotton is affected that the Delta takes
cognizance of the outside world.

Cotton is more than a crop in the Delta. It is a form of
mysti­cism. It is a religion and a way of life. Cotton is omnipresent here as a
god is omnipresent. It is omnipotent as a god is omni­potent, giving life and
taking life away. Here the industrial revo­lution is an academic adumbration
dimly heard, an alien device scarcely comprehended. In an age of machines, the
patient mule lost in prehistoric thought, followed by a plodding Negro down a
turnrow, remains the machine age of the Delta.

Year after year the Delta struggles to maintain itself upon
an economy resting squarely on cotton. And cotton is produced by Negroes, who
bring in their train a whole set of difficult and delicate problems. They are
largely bound to the land as share­croppers on large plantations, and out of
this system, essentially unchanged since the Civil War, flows another set of
problems which no man has been able to solve. The result is that the Delta is
affected not only by the general economic conditions prevailing in the world, but
also by those peculiar to its economy.

Spiritually the white man here constantly struggles with his
desire to be just to a people who are helpless beneath white domination, and
the all too human temptation to exploit them. He is tortured by his indecision
whether to attempt to raise their educational and cultural level, or to leave
them where they are. Racially he is determined that the white race shall be
kept free of Negro blood. But he makes no serious objection if white blood is
poured into the veins of Negroes. Individually he must accede to the prevailing
codes governing racial relations, whether he agrees with them or no, and
traditionally he moves within the shadows of noblesse oblige cast by the founders of his society.

The Negro, for his part, must work out his destiny within a
framework created and ordained for him by the white man. He must be all things
to all people, an actor who never steps out of character. He must adapt himself
with the fluidity of water to all the varied personalities of the white
community with whom he comes in contact. He must be prepared to play clown or
tragedian at a moment’s notice. He must accept, silently and unhesitatingly,
the conditions of living laid down by the domi­nant race. He must not forget
that he dwells in a white man's country. Within these limits, and subject to
these exceptions, be may pursue to the best of his ability the way of life that
be prefers.

This, briefly, is the Mississippi Delta. Under these
conditions, against this background, and in this environment nearly one hun
dred thousand white and three hundred thousand Negroes live and have their
being. It is a strange and detached fragment thrown off by the whirling comet
that is America.